In the Annals of St Bertin there's mention of an attack by the Danes (Vikings) on a region of Francia in 859 AD, where the peasants formed an association to defend themselves and fought off the Vikings, and drove them off without the assistance of the Carolingian rulers.
This is reported by the Carolingians as brave but immoral, because Charlemagne had banned any such associations or militias, and military service was reserved for aristocrats only.
The response of the Frankish leadership was to come in and massacre the peasants who had defended their own land. Peasant autonomy and self-defense of any kind could not be tolerated.
> Les Danois dévastent les pays au-delà de l'Escaut. Le commun peuple des pays entre Seine et Loire, conjuré entre soi, résiste courageusement aux Danois établis sur la Seine ; mais sa conjuration étant conduite sans prudence, il est facilement défait par nos grands.
Which I would translate (using some true-to-heart adaptation given author period) by:
Danes (norsemen) raid country further the Escaut (probably that river in the north). Commoners from between Seine et Loire (in the center so), which were seceding at the time (secede is way too modern but best bears the sense IMO), bravely resist to Danes camping by the Seine; this secession however being lead without much thought, is easily defeated by our rulers (kings or dukes I'd say, and probably over months).
These annals are telegraph styled, written by multiple authors, etc. They are kind of notes. Yet they are one of the best material over this period of French history :)
Thanks for your citation. I was able to get through to the original Latin text [1]. It is ambiguous.
Dani loca ultra Scaldem populantur. Vulgus promiscuum inter Sequanam et Ligerum inter se coniurans adversus Danos in Sequana consistentes, fortiter resistit; sed quia incaute suscepta est eorum coniuratio, a potentioribus nostris facile interficiuntur.
Which translates roughly as follows. (I'm not a medieval Latin scholar so some meanings may be off.)
The Danes plunder the areas beyond the Scheldt River. The common people between the Seine and Loire, allying themselves [or: conspiring] against the Danes residing on the Seine, fight strongly; but because their alliance [or: conspiracy] was undertaken without care, they are easily killed by our more powerful [troops].
It does not say explicitly whom the commoners were fighting. The word used for their alliance also means conspiracy and can be quite negative. It's the same word used in the phrase "Conspiracy of Cataline."
p.s. It's mind-blowing what you can find on the Internet.
No, the text is ambiguous, but the main point about forbidden peasant autonomy and the "easily defeated" peasantry still stands. Look at the translation from the Latin in the other comment.
I have no relevant information for that era so this is purely a translation note. I'd love to learn more though, would you mind sharing additional reading you find pertinent?
I question your use of "seceding" for "conjuré". As far as I understand, the connotation of ~seperation from a whole~ is absent in the original french which I'd argue speaks more of the spontaneous and unsanctioned nature of this militia's constitution.
As in "le peuple ..., conjuré entre soi" could be adapted to "the people, having organised to take arms"
Fair enough, I'm no medieval scholar, I am/was merely commenting with the interpretation that Chris Wickham (who is) had in his book "The Inheritance Of Rome", where he begins his chapter "The caging of the peasantry" with a brief discussion of this event (and a translation that looks a bit more like the one done from the Latin by the other commenter).
He does point out that the meaning of "incaute" is ambiguous here, but the salient point still stands: that military service was forbidden from the common people and that an organized common people was not allowed, and dangerous. It is speculative but he comments that these peasants may have felt they were following in the footsteps of their grandfathers who would have rightfully assembled for defense in time of need, and in fact that had formerly been the prerogative of free peasants.
So the point still pretty much stands regardless, the language speaks of free peasants self-organizing as a threat and an easily defeated one.
I'm not so sure that both events are not linked, given that the peasants were 'seceding' they probably prepared themselves against an army which would explain why they were able to fight against the Vikings..
That's exactly right, although over time "nobility" added a layer of polish and distance which allowed it to pretend that nobles were more refined, more intelligent, and generally better people - when in fact they were just the most successful crooks.
This continued all the way through the 20th century, where the disposable deplorables did the fighting while the aristocracy profited.
There were even strong links to drugs. Look up the history of the opium wars for details.
Most of the UK's country estates were built from the profits of slavery, drugs, and colonialism - which is just nation-scale feudal conquest painted over with flag-waving patriotism.
This continued all the way through the 20th century, where the disposable deplorables did the fighting while the aristocracy profited.
The upper classes volunteered enthusiastically for WW1 and died in vast numbers in the trenches along with the commoners. Perhaps because they had come to believe their own myths of honour and glory.
I see it like all political systems really comes from people stepping up to acquire power over the common people, and over time are given de-facto legitimacy.
Kinda like a mobster turning their money into legit business, and eventually their heirs takes over and people forgetting about how it all started.
My pet theory about why modern democracy appeared when it did instead of earlier during the Medieval period is that it coincided with the rise of cheap muskets, which overturned the power dynamic between masses of untrained and unequipped peasants and knights with lifelong combat training and the best armor technology available. When victories started to depend less on whoever had the best elite fighting force and more on whoever had the most muskets in the field, the winner is whoever had a better system for funneling wealth and power to as many people as possible instead of to just a small class of elite fighters. For a new state with little government tax revenue or wealth, the democratic vote was a cheap and effective way for America to raise as many militiamen and muskets as possible. If muskets didn't come onto the military scene when it did and the American revolution was fought between armored knights, I'm quite confident the vote would have remained limited to only landowners that had enough economic surplus to spend their time training and maintaining their war equipment instead of spreading to anyone that could hold a musket.
Based on this model, WW2 was probably peak democratic potential. Everyone had the same capacity to hold a rifle or work on an assembly line, and whatever country could mobilize the most workers/soldiers would be the strongest. With automation and computerization, a member of the technology elite that can program a robot to make widgets or shoot hostiles can roll that out to replace millions of humans instantly. The world is reverting back to the economic and technological setup that fostered feudalism, where someone trained from birth with the best equipment can outproduce and outfight a numerically superior force.
The big difference between old and neofeudalism I can see is that the technological elites in neofeudalism are more vulnerable than the old military elites because they individually also have lower bargaining power. For a medieval knight, their effectiveness is the same no matter which king they serve under, which gives them plenty of power to switch sides. For a member of the technological elite, you may be so hyperspecialized in your niche that if you leave the system that gives you the ecosystem and tools to do your work, your economic value plunges. An individual chip designer without a company that can pay thousands for monthly EDA software licenses or the millions needed to tape out a chip is as unproductive as any member of the unskilled labor pool. Even the average web developer is dependent on a surrounding national/international technological ecosystem far more than a medieval knight would be on his private estate. In neofeudalism, the real holders of power are the same as in older feudalism. They're propagandists, kings, clergymen, academics, populists, think tanks, revolutionaries, people with enough social acumen to get others to do things that coincide with what they want and make them like it at the same time.
George Orwell has an essay, You and the Atomic Bomb[1], where he makes a very similar case:
> It is a commonplace that the history of civilisation is largely the history of weapons. In particular, the connection between the discovery of gunpowder and the overthrow of feudalism by the bourgeoisie has been pointed out over and over again. And though I have no doubt exceptions can be brought forward, I think the following rule would be found generally true: that ages in which the dominant weapon is expensive or difficult to make will tend to be ages of despotism, whereas when the dominant weapon is cheap and simple, the common people have a chance. Thus, for example, tanks, battleships and bombing planes are inherently tyrannical weapons, while rifles, muskets, long-bows and hand-grenades are inherently democratic weapons. A complex weapon makes the strong stronger, while a simple weapon – so long as there is no answer to it – gives claws to the weak.
Which makes sense given that it started with the settlement of the island by Helier de Carteret in 1565, well after feudalism in England was on the way out.
Do you have a source for this? This sounds like a fishy story to me based on my understanding of medieval society:
1. Peasants are often called up for military duty as levies (conscripts), to supplement the knights and men-at-arms. Especially when there wasn't a standing army.
2. Authority wasn't so centralized -- these local matters would be the authority of local lords, not the king.
"Peasant autonomy and self-defense of any kind could not be tolerated."
In the United States, "gun control" (restrictions on gun rights) is universally classified as a liberal/left policy and the absence of "gun control" is classified as a conservative/right policy.
Without entering into a discussion of these politics I would like to point out that those classifications are completely backwards.
The US Second Amendment (and associated US gun rights, court interpretations, etc.) are extremely liberal, from an historical perspective.
Frankly as an outside observer (Canada), the "right to arms" in the context of the United States seems fairly clearly to be tied to the history of slave ownership, not the revolutionary war. Raising a militia for defense in the context of the US south has pretty clear implications.
Just because there's a right to bear arms in the US doesn't mean the public there has any effective resistance against state coercion or violence. History doesn't bear that out at all. Likewise over history in countries that have no right to bear arms there have been many instances of the population resisting state coercion.
Guns are fairly easily obtained in a licensed and registered manner here in Canada and in many other countries that have large rural areas, etc. for the purpose of hunting and sport. Sure, hand guns or assault weapons, no. And yes, there are no constitutional guarantees of this. But it's mostly irrelevant because the public is on the whole supportive of the notion that guns like cars and pesticides and other things are a fairly dangerous tool where the public as a whole gains from carefully watching them.
Please do not confuse "liberalism", the moral philosophy espoused by Locke/Montesquieu/Mill et al., with "liberal" as used as an adjective in modern-day US politics. The two have almost nothing to do with each other.
They don't have almost nothing to do with one another. Modern American liberalism is based pretty heavily on universal suffrage and human rights.
The Rawlsian veil of ignorance[1] that the modern American left is pretty much based on is largely an extension of Locke.
Sure, there are some economic ideas that the early liberals had that most modern liberals (and modern conservatives for that matter) would eschew, but to reduce their thinking to being purely libertarian does a disservice to the modern left, which needs all the historical support it can muster.
Incorrect. Republicans have successfully branded themselves as gun advocates, and Democrats as anti-gun. There are as many liberal gun owners as conservatives. Liberals just don't jerk off with their guns on social media.
Some brief googling doesn't support the assertion that there are as many liberal (Democratic) gun owners as their are conservative (Republican) gun owners:
But this is way too reductive. There's lots of gun ownership in the US across all political affiliations. Additionally, gun ownership is independent of someone's views on guns. I know people with liberal views on gun ownership who don't own guns and people with restrictive views on gun ownership who do own guns.
I wonder if one day in the distant future, humans will each have their own autonomous mutually assured destruction devices hovering around them at all times, almost like a guardian angel.
The "slap drone" of Iain M. Banks' culture performs a similar function in a different way: IIRC, convicted murders are allowed out, but followed forever by an autonomous drone that will stun (slap) them to prevent further crimes.
You're misremembering a detail: the term isn't "slap drone", but "drone slapped" – as in, you'll be slapped with an electronic ankle bracelet in drone form. That drone doesn't necessarily have to physically hurt or stun you to prevent you from doing something bad; even at the time when Player of Games (in which this concept is explained) is set, drones are powerful and sophisticated enough to displace or physically restrain someone with their field effectors.
Also, if you murder someone, you won't be invited to parties anymore.
You might like Vernor Vinge's work. This is briefly touched on in "Marooned in Realtime", and I suspect a prior novel, "The Peace War" is similarly interesting.
The government has weapons that are literally thousands of times more destructive than anything you can wield under the second amendment. That's just apart from the fact that the vast majority of citizens cannot afford even a single fighter jet or cruise missile.
I'm all for citizens owning cruise missiles but, I think that's missing the point. The point is that an organized and armed population of say Vietnamese farmers could theoretically hold off against the largest power in the world until they decided to move on
Sure, but after they move on you're left with nothing but your homes burnt down and your family dead, while they're still the largest economic and military power in the world living it up in their first-world mansions. Pyrrhic victories taste just like defeat.
The american airforce and navy are quite small (thousands of ships). A well placed strike force couple wipe the whole thing out. And then you're back to guys with rifles, unless you're going to start dropping nukes.
I suspect they would have limited usage - both from the legal concerns/lack of utility but also because the obvious counters would be even more readily available - outrange the thing. Assuming it is relatively precise instead of carrying a kilogram of antimatter or something absurd.
The situation is 'very high information entropy' in the sense of it is a combination of both requiring both high technology proliferation and prosperity at the same time as severe and sustained instability for it to become remotely acceptable as a status quo instead of "National Guard? We need artillery on this maniac going around with a death drone. How the hell did he get it in the first place?" Theoretically a dual use guardian drone could say work for digging someone out of a collapsed building quickly which could also be lethal if misapplied but that is getting into 'keeping rattlesnake anti-venom in your pocket all times in Canada in case you get bit by one escaped from the zoo or potentially illegal exotic pet trade' levels in terms of effort and expense vs returns in safety.
It's one of the reasons the 2nd Amendment was written; to avoid tyrannical rule, and to allow the "peasants" (regular people) to revolt if a tyrant ever took power.
As a European I've always thought that this bit of US law has not aged all that well. Imagine a tyrant takes hold of the US armed forces and uses that to overthrow the rest of government so they can rule alone. The US armed forces have equipment going up to tanks, fighter jets, bombers, drones and nuclear weapons. A militia is going to struggle to field even heavy machine guns, let alone an air force. I doubt they'd have the logistics either.
In short, 2nd amendment militias don't seem a very realistic deterrent to a modern army.
I have saved a post about this from 4chan, they passed it around on some pro-gun rights forums. Will paraphrase it and spare you the expletives.
"You cannot control an entire country and its people with tanks, jets, battleships and drone or any of these things you believe trump's citizen ownership of firearms.
A fighter jet, tank, drone, battleship or whatever cannot stand on street corners. And enforce "no assembly" edicts. A fighter jet cannot kick down your door at 3am and search your house for contraband.
None of these things can maintain the needed police state to completely subjugate and enslave the people of a nation. Those weapons are for decimating, flattening and glassing large areas and many people at once and fighting other state militaries. The government does not want to kill all of its people and blow up its own infrastructure. These are the very things they need to be tyrants in the first place. If they decided to turn everything outside of Washington DC into glowing green glass they would be the absolute rulers of a big, worthless, radioactive pile of [excrement].
Police are needed to maintain a police state, boots on the ground. And no matter how many police you have on the ground they will always be vastly outnumbered by civilians which is why is a police state it is vital that your police have automatic weapons while civilians are unarmed.
BUT when every random pedestrian could have a Glock in their waistband and every random homeowner an AR-15 all of that goes out of the window because now the police are outnumbered and face the reality of bullets coming back at them.
If you want living examples of this look at every insurgency that the US military has tried to destroy. They're all still kicking with nothing but AK-47s, pick-up trucks and improvised explosives because these big weapons you talk about are useless for dealing with them. ".
> If you want living examples of this look at every insurgency that the US military has tried to destroy. They're all still kicking with nothing but AK-47s, pick-up trucks and improvised explosives because these big weapons you talk about are useless for dealing with them.
Guerilla warfare is a sharp reminder that the biggest weapon a soldier has is the one between his ears. Standing armies, like the story of david and goliath, "deploy" troops with the expectation that the other side will play by their rules. The result? David ain't about that life and uses his head, sling and a rock. You can have all the weapons in the world, nothing can garuantee your victory.
So how do the politicians and top brass justify the dead sons and no real, tangible success? They order the army to kill civilians ofcourse. Can you imagine training soldiers for a million bucks a pop, then he gets killed by a homemade bomb in some wadhi?
In short, war is a mess. It's not more guns needed, it's diplomacy.
You don't need any of the above if you have an effective media machine that tells people what to think.
Which you very much do in the US. The militias aren't there to protect "freedom", they're kept on hand in case they're ever needed to protect privilege.
So basically, it can't protect against all out war on it's citizens, or a oppressive government willing to kill innocents in order to terrorise the population; but it could protect against softer power grabs or coups.
> A fighter jet, tank, drone, battleship or whatever cannot stand on street corners. And enforce "no assembly" edicts.
Loitering drones sure could.
The US seems to have one of the most widely deployed sets of them (so far), spends lots of R&D money to improve (and automate) them, and has already shown they'll be covertly used within US borders for (at least) surveillance operations.
You are thinking of a traditional force on force battle, which is not what it would be. Looking at the Taliban in Afghanistan would be a more accurate picture of how it would look. It would be an insurgency of mostly unknown members that lived with and among average citizens, as well as a larger support network of citizens that provided material support (food, equipment, medical supplies, etc) to “the cause”.
You would have a small percent of “full time” insurgents that would probably operate in rural areas of the US, in order to better hide larger equipment, but that would be the minority. Most of the time they would be avoiding conflict with military forces, only attacking vulnerable areas and forcing the military to guard everything. I remember reading that trying to surveil Afghanistan was already using the majority of the US’ aerial surveillance assets. The US is massive, with huge rural areas and tons of regular traffic to hide amongst.
A dictator would likely attempt to crush opposition with a heavy handed military response. That would likely serve in the insurgents favor, as it would turn the average citizen against the military strangers with tanks in the streets, checkpoints, and extra judiciary killings of civilians. Just look at the police protests and riots over the summer. The heavy police response stoked more anger and resolve and grew protests and people willing to provide support.
It is also worth noting that we don’t know how much of the military would fall in line with this. And even if they did, how many would secretly help the insurgency. How many insurgents would be tipped off to unguarded National Guard bases with military hardware? Do you really think the military would willingly use nukes on its own people? Bombers? Tanks? Just because the military has them, doesn’t mean they could be used effectively.
You don't have to win open battles. You just have to make it not worthwhile to keep fighting. Think Vietnam war. Also, in this scenario the army will not be united. In our civil war, many army units joined the rebels.
Why do you assume the US military is united against the people like that. If a tyrant takes over the US military you can expect a large number of the existing military will leave. They might have jets, but it doesn't do any good when whoever is flying them takes off and then uses the bombs on yet, then ejects over enemy territory thus ensuring that you cannot use that jet anymore while they survive as a hero.
Vietnamese farmers have a different view point. It's not about competing on an open field, its about not being able to be subjugated. Another historical example would be American snipers in trees picking off the British commanders during the revolution.
Remember those guys who let their house guest attack the US a little under 20yr ago? Last I checked they're in the process of getting their country back.
The "but they have tanks and nukes" argument has been long debunked. To actually run an oppressive nation you need boots on the ground which requires very strong support from a very sizeable minority (e.g South Africa, Northern Ireland). The less firepower the peasants have the smaller the minority you need is. You can't fight a insurgency with tanks and bombs without destroying the things you seek to protect. If you're England crapping all over Ireland or if you're the US crapping all over Iraq you can kind of make it work as long as you have political will and keep the death tolls low because your supply lines and political support are isolated from the violence (notice how quickly the Troubles wrapped up once the bombs started going off in England). It's much harder to fight an insurgency when people are sabotaging your supply chains. See the 4chan copypasta someone else posted for other details.
You will note that Northern Ireland has a plurality of Protestants (48%) compared to a sizable Catholic community (45%). The majority of people in Northern Ireland do not support a united Ireland up to this point. At some point in the future that may change and a referendum for reunification may be held (if the Irish government agrees). And, note, it is not at all for sure that the Irish government would agree because Northern Ireland is a cats cradle of trouble and problem - demographically, economically, politically and in terms of civil order. I think only with very significant backing from the EU could Ireland contemplate taking it on.
Currently the UK (read England, because the Welsh and Scots are also net recipients of significant monies from England) subsidizes every subject in Northern Ireland to the tune of $7k per year, if that is "crapping all over Ireland" frankly I'd like a bag of that shit please.
And frankly there is peace in Ireland now because the IRA lost, it lost support in it's communities and it lost interest in freedom fighting because one element of it realized that a political solution had been available for at least 10 years, and one element realised it was far more interested in trading drugs and protection.
Anyway : please do some research and reading and don't use straight falsehoods to support an otherwise reasonable argument. Perhaps traveling to Ireland would be a good start.
You're getting caught up in the technical details because this is an ideologically driven issue.
NA had two minorities with opposite enough ideologies that they got violent. The UK would have never succeeded in keeping the peace there were it not for having a good chunk of the population on "their side". The violence eventually came to mostly an end because the IRA blew up enough crap that the British were willing to mostly throw them a bone in the Good Friday agreement and everyone was sick enough of the fighting to reach an agreement. The agreement was satisfactory enough for enough people that most combatants laid down their arms. An agreement so favorable (i.e. favorable enough to get them to stop fighting) to the republican faction(s) would never have been reached without the violence spilling over into England to a greater extent in the 1980s and making people ask tough questions like "why does what they do even matter to us?". You can call that a "loss" or a "win" or a "pivot to drug trafficking" or whatever you want to make it compatible with your politics. The framing doesn't really change what happened. Considering your characterization of North Ireland I don't expect you to frame the issue in a neutral way.
Consider how the troubles might have played out without loyalist factions. Starts looking a lot like some other, nastier, more resource sucking conflicts. Local support is required any time you want to make a bunch of people do stuff you don't want them to.
You say technical details, I say relevant facts. I don't have any ideological perspective, my family are 1/2 irish catholic and I live in the UK - I don't care what happens in northern ireland at all.
But, the loyalist factions were the majority, post WW2 it's just for sure that the UK wouldn't have (and certainly wouldn't now) hang around in Northern Ireland, apart from most of the people in Northern Ireland historically wanted to stay as part of the UK. A minority wanted to leave and fought a violent campaign to do so. The minority was ruthlessly discriminated against and terrorized by the majority - which complicated matters to say the least. These issues do not boil down in the way that you indicate, things are complicated. An agreement like the Belfast agreement had been on the table for the IRA for many years - and frankly it's not very favorable, the only major concession that I can think of was the dissolution of the RUC - but is the police service of northern ireland really that different? I mean it is vs the RUC of 1975 (that's for sure) but vs the RUC of 1998? The big issue that the IRA's final spurt of bombing decided was that they didn't disarm before the agreement was negotiated and signed - but instead after it was agreed and signed. The two truck bombs were painful, but Manchester would not be the city it is now without the last one - and docklands doesn't seem to have suffered much tbh. The Bishop's gate bomb in 1993 was probably more economically impactful than either, and there was no hint of compromise after that.
The UK has very limited economic, military or geographic interest in Northern Ireland. The oil was elsewhere, there is fishing - but we are talking $10M's per year at the most there, and most of that goes to NI boats in any case. There's no reason for the UK to be there apart from the fact that a) the bulk of the population think that they are part of the UK and b) the irish government would be in the mire trying to deal with it if it suddenly came to be their job. Without these two factors there wouldn't have been a conflict, because the UK would have dropped it like a hot coal.
We have modern examples of this situation, and that’s not how it works. In the 1971 Bangladesh independence war, the Pakistani military started conducting a genocide of Bangladeshis. (They didn’t do it with fighter jets, which they had plenty of, but infantry with rifles.) Bangladesh was mostly disarmed, but arms were funneled to it from India. Civilians also raised army supply depots to steal guns. They then put up a resistance with the arms they had or could get. That caused large swaths of the Pakistani military—many of whom were Bangladeshis—to defect and fight for independence. A citizen military’s willingness to fight their own people is limited. Having enough arms to start the armed resistance was the most important thing. And I suspect a lot fewer Bangladeshis would have been killed in the genocide had they been as well-armed as Americans are.
At the end of the day, holding territory is hard. Look at how much trouble Americans have had subduing the Taliban in Afghanistan. The bombs, tanks, planes, etc., are largely useless in holding a city. Now, combine that with the fact that the US military is comprised of citizen soldiers, who would be in the position of fighting against their own communities.
It’s when a community is totally disarmed, and when the mere show of military force would force total capitulation without violence, that a citizen military could rationalize aiding tyranny.
It’s also worth pointing out that there are 50 governors who command national guards that have fighter planes and tanks and whatnot. In a real civil war, armed citizenry would likely be fighting alongside state forces.
I'm very sorry, but the militia presence in the US has never served to protect against tyranny, but rather to preserve it. You've truly been mislead if you believe that is its purpose. I grew up around lots of these sorts of people and what those guys are really for is to keep the blacks and immigrants properly terrorized and subjugated. My experiences with them were that they were uniformly from the most racist and ignorant class of whites, usually the ones the military wouldn't take, and they were essentially another version of KKK. That crap in the 2nd amendment about a well regulated militia is a nice cover to let these dudes do their thing, but please do not confuse that with the actual purpose of these people in US society. They maintain white supremacy.
Was the US trying to tyrannically attack those places? The government had to constantly answer to it's populace for those wars; if it had to answer to no one, things may have been different.
How about Russia in Afghanistan? Surely they had much less accountability and a similar technology gap (yes, I know the US supplied the fighters with some advanced weaponry). Yet, the had the same outcome as the US.
You don't need the right to bear arms to revolt to tyrants.
There is no similar right in any other part of the World, in every other part of the World there have been revolts, sometimes much larger than US has ever witnessed.
Many countries have also revolted against USA, that more often than not has been the tryrant.
To be fair, unarmed revolts have always been crushed unless they were supported by foreign militaries (like the US.) I'd like to see a citation of a single unarmed revolution that succeeded.
edit: the armed right wing of the US could easily decide that they didn't like the outcome of the election, and change it. The volunteer military and national police forces entirely constructed to prosecute the drug war are overwhelmingly right wing. Second amendment warriors tend to own more guns than they have fingers and toes. That the civil service and the majority of patrician-generals at the top support the result of the election would be no hindrance.
The purpose of being armed is really to force the opposition to massacre you. A right-wing revolution as described above would probably have fewer than a couple of thousand casualties. It's very easy to still feel like the good guy if the only casualties of your revolution were a few of your most deeply committed archenemies (i.e. a few lefty militia types.) It's a lot more difficult when you're hurling artillery into normal civilian neighborhoods.
There were plenty of Northern Irish neighborhoods into which UK military and the police simply couldn't operate without negotiating with a representative of that neighborhood.
1 - you don't need to be armed, you nede to be able to, in case you;re going to need it (for example through external support)
2 - you prove my point, there is no armed revolt that succeeded only because people were armed, you need international support (at least from your neighbours)
> I'd like to see a citation of a single unarmed revolution that succeeded.
> The purpose of being armed is really to force the opposition to massacre you
exactly.
that's the point.
and that's why you don't point a gun to a policeman.
being armed has always been a disadvantage for regular people.
That's why the comment bringing up the 2nd amendment is completely off topic in this context, 10 centuries ago if you traveled armed you had to be ready to fight, because everyone armed like you was going to try to kill you: you represented a danger.
it's the same thing that happens today in US, a lot of people are armed, they have guns on them, the police patrolling is even more heavily armed that the gangsters, they take a look a round, see something fishy, they see a gun, they shoot.
No question asked.
So, to go back on topic, being unarmed for the peasants of the Carolingian era most of the time made the difference between being killed and being simply robbed.
That would be true if it was just civilians fighting, but the military is usually on the side of the tyrant.
It’s mathematically better, I think that armed populace has a higher chance of revolt vs armed loyalist populace + armed military than unarmed populace vs unarmed loyalist + armed military.
And I also think the reasoning is that the anti-tyrannical populace will be much larger than the pro-tyrannical populace since if the tyrant has the support of the people then are they really a tyrant.
The civil war in the US was different. The last war fought with the old swords tactics, but using modern rifles. After it was over everyone looked in horror and decided that new ways for fighting were needed before they went to war again.
a thousand years before the 2nd amendment was conceived, peasant had other preoccupations than bearing expensive, heavy, difficult to handle arms.
What were they thinking?
Did they not love freedom?
It's so incredible that they did not copy the US Constitution, even though the first Constitution in the human history /, the Magna Charts, was written 4 centuries later than the Annales Bertiniani, in 1215.
Seriously guys, 2nd amendment was written in 1791, the Annales Bertiniani are from 840.
The idea that the 2nd amendment protects the peasants is also wrong and it's one of the reasons people laugh at USA, when the 2nd amendment was approved, Grand Duchy of Tuscany had already abolished death penalty.
2nd amendment was introduced to permit people to shoot tax collectors (i.e. the British)
>2nd amendment was introduced to permit people to shoot tax collectors (i.e. the British)
The 2nd Amendment was introduced because the states were afraid a standing national army would give too much power to the Federal government, so the plan was to have individual states field their own militias instead. Also because the principles of the right to self defense were established in British common law at the time - but that has more to do with keeping cougars and vandals away than any abstract fears of tyranny.
You're right that it didn't really protect "peasants" - it mostly protected the interests of rich landowners. Which is, ironically, what Ben Franklin was actually arguing against with his often repeated (and misinterpreted) quote about those who trade a little liberty for safety deserving neither.
> quote about those who trade a little liberty for safety deserving neither
He said stuff like that left and right. He was very much in favor of sticking to one's ideological guns even when personally inconvenient. He was arguing in favor of the federal government retaining the authority to tax in the instance everyone quotes.
Do you have more detail on this? Is there supporting detail from other sources? It's not clear from my brief reading that the association was conclusively for self-defense and held no insurrectionary or political aspect.
It might have started for self-defence, but became insurrectionist once the vikings had been defeated. "Why should we pay fealty to a liege that fails at his most basic duty?"
The terms used are "conjurés/conjuration" (from Google: Middle English (also in the sense ‘oblige by oath’): from Old French conjurer ‘to plot or exorcise’, from Latin conjurare ‘band together by an oath, conspire’ (in medieval Latin ‘invoke’), from con- ‘together’ + jurare ‘swear’.).
It seems to imply something more than just gather together for self-defence.
> the peasants formed an association to defend themselves and fought off the Vikings ... military service was reserved for aristocrats only ... The response of the Frankish leadership was to come in and massacre the peasants
Strange that the peasants could fight back a group of Vikings ("the toughest warriors ever" according to National Geographic[0]) but not a bunch of aristocrats.
Using "bunch of aristocrats" pejoratively is a thoroughly modern take. Aristocrats were the best fighters in their day. They were the ones with money for good arms and time to train well, besides which fighting was for many of them their profession.
Besides, "toughest warriors ever" sounds more like popular colouring than an academic assessment. I don't know a lot about Vikings but as I understand they were principally raiders, which I would absolutely expect to perform worse than a Frankish aristocrat-led army.
I'm certain there were some great fighters amongst the Vikings; after all, they have an entire age named after them and their raids. Viking was an activity, not a people though, and the Vikings were mostly Norse peasants trained to fight with shields and basic weapons like spears and axes. There was an elite class and a small class of professional warriors too, but they weren't really a majority.
There's more than one type of "Viking" warrior the Elite Huscarls where effectively professionals and are considered one of the best heavy shock infantry period - this is what they are referring to as Vikings.
Though this is prior to the switch to mounted knights
Yes, definitely. It's just that the raiding parties weren't just consisting of professional warriors. Many were simply farmers with axes, bows and spears, seeking plunder and glory like the others.
>I don't know a lot about Vikings but as I understand they were principally raiders, which I would absolutely expect to perform worse than a Frankish aristocrat-led army.
In a pitched battle, on a open terrain, in a nice weather with preferably not too soft soil.
Also if you want to find tough people you look them at the extremes - so high north, or up in the mountains or in the deserts.
They'd be experienced in many different forms of combat, pitched battles were a rarity in most eras, and certainly the early middle ages.
I also don't think toughness is the right metric. We're not talking about brawls, we're talking about trained, well-equipped professionals doing their jobs.
If you look at European warfare after the collapse of the Roman empire and before the Siege of Vienna it was basically a wave of ass kickers coming from central asia and getting their ass kicked by the next wave coming from central asia.
The Vikings might not have been looking for a fight, just some easy plunder.
It happens that prey can fight of the predator. The prey if fighting for its life. The predator might not want to risk even an injury rather than just finding the next opportunity.
This is pretty much it. The Viking raids were, mostly, a way of obtaining loot and thralls, and it gave the peasantry an opportunity to attain an otherwise unattainable amount of wealth, and a way to Valhalla if things went wrong.
One thing to keep in mind when imagining "Knight vs Peasant" combat is that it's not like they would be fighting in some sort of idealized battle arena. Knights have horses and peasants do not, which means that barring exceptional circumstances, the knight has the initiative to determine when and where combat happens. People without horses have an extremely difficult time fighting people with horses, beyond just the reality of actual combat. If the horsemen want to raid your supply lines or burn down your countryside or disrupt your trade networks, how do you stop them? They can concentrate forces much more quickly than a foot army can form or react. In the 11th century a few hundred Norman knights conquered Sicily and southern Italy. Even through the 1860s a few thousand Comanche controlled a large portion of the American southwest because there was no good way to fight them.
Knights and aristocracy held their power through force, so there is no question that knights could overwhelmingly defeat peasants.
However, what is often missed in the depictions of peasants is that they were much stronger than modern folk, they did kill animals quite often, they did fight other peasants quite often.
Free peasants were a different story from bound peasants, mountain peasants a different story from low lands.
I know because my grandparents were peasants from a mountainous region, you did not want to mess with those peasants.
I could go all they about the acts of aggression, strength and bravery I've witnessed (same on the contrary).
Such a peasant would not fight in pitch battle, but would simply burn their crops, take their cattle and sheep up the mountain and return in autumn when armies would go back home.
They would setup ambushes, mostly targeting guides, but they were quite opportunistic.
It was remarkable reading Xenophon's account of fighting mountain people in ancient times -- while I did feel his disgust for them, the sense was that they could be quite dangerous when fighting on their home turf.
Yes, they did. Lot of physical demanding tasks, but no, they were in a almost constant state of sub nutrition to be stronger that a modern working class person.
Have a look at what's called the 'infantry revolution' started by the Swiss and later the German Landsknechts. Starting in the 1300s, the role of knights in battles got lessened by this, until they were basically only a flanking tool in most armies. It was basically a reinvention of the Greek phalanx.
There are enough examples of victories of pure infantry armies against knights from that time period. I think your points apply more in the period between 1000 and 1300.
I always wonder how much a liability a horse was during medieval combat. Sure speed and maneuverability are great but up close it seems that horse is quite vulnerable to attacks on the legs for example with long bladed weapons. You can’t really protect horse’s legs with armor
In the right circumstances, yes, it could be a liability.
Here in Late Medieval Czechia we had a militant reformation movement called the Hussites. Of course, the rest of Catholic Europe sent in several crusades to crush the heretics, without much success.
One of the many reasons why the crusaders failed were so-called Wagenburgs [0]. Basically, the Hussite army would be underway with very heavy wagons and, if the scouts brought back information about an approaching enemy, would build a provisional fort out of them fairly quickly. Such a fort could not be swept away by a cavalry attack and if the defenders had enough guns (and by that time early firearms were already used in Europe), the knights tightly packed around the wagenburg would present a perfect target.
Plus, there were kids under the wagons with very sharp scythes, hacking at the unprotected horses' legs just in front of them, just as you mention.
That is so cool to learn about. My first exposure to war wagons was in AoE 3 [1] and I always wondered how a fortified wagon drawn by horse was somehow a counter to cavalry when you would theoretically just kill the horse and render the wagon useless (a mobility kill). Makes much more sense when you consider that a bunch of them are essentially a portable fort.
Being the target of a cavalry charge is absolutely terrifying even for hardened soldiers. There is very little chance of fighting effectively when everyone around you is fleeing or being pressed together. And you're being charged by a 2-ton armored war machine. Or dozens of them. I'm a reenactor. It's even terrifying when you know it's fake and you know you're safe.
Knights did loose horses though. They all took multiple war horses with them to battle (a "lance" usually consisted of one knight, multiple warhorses and a regular horse for travel/supplies and several servants). When they lost their horse, they fought their way back to their own side and got on the next horse.
> When they lost their horse, they fought their way back to their own side and got on the next horse.
Oh interesting, so it was basically expected? Not a force majeure? I always thought losing a horse back then was a really big event for the knight, borderline tragic - a big financial loss, a highly increased likelihood of dying (getting stuck under the horse etc etc)
Oh it is, a warhorse is very expensive. But they were still expected to take multiple warhorses into a battle in case one of them got killed. And fighting your way back is easier said than done.
The most common reason for loosing a warhorse is probably not that it was killed. It was that it was wounded by archers. In that case you can ride back, swap horses and join the cavalry again. And tend to the wounded horse after the battle.
after reading about some feats of strength exhibited by knights, I assume carrying your precious war horse back to safety wasn't completely out of the picture.
"My kingdom for a horse" being the famous cry of Richard III, though he carried on fighting on foot in the play before being killed by Richmond. When they found his body a few years ago he'd died of head wounds implying that he'd ended the battle on foot.
You can leave the horse behind and continue by walk if you think it gives you advantage. The speed and maneuverability here is not just about during combat, but mostly about ability to do long term plan and maneuver.
Horse is a large animal IRL, killing it or even seriously injuring with a blade is not trivial. And when there's a knight with a lance or a longsword on top, you might not even get one shot at it.
A good counter example is the Battle of Poitiers in 1356. There, the English archers not only defeated the French nobility in melee' but captured a good many of them, a total catastrophe for France. Though this battle may be the exception that proves the rule, more than anything.
The English similarly defeated France at the prior Battle of Crécy, as well.
They are not great counterexamples in the "Knight vs Peasant" argument because you're talking about an entire English army led by an English prince. In the slightly larger-scope argument of knights vs footmen in combat, sure, it's a very good example.
Crossbow - armor-piercing weapon was the RPG of Middle Ages. There were constant attempts to ban crossbows.
Second Lateran Council banned use of crossbow against Christians.
> And Western knights did not like it. Their armor protected them from most weapons they would face with the exception of the longbow, a weapon that took years to learn and decades to master. But crossbows could slice right through the armor at greater range than even a longbow, and shooters could be trained in hours or days.
>Second Lateran Council banned use of crossbow against Christians.
Not sure if this is actually true. The council (specifically Canon 29) refers to ballistarii and sagittarii. Ballistarii may mean either crossbowmen or slingers, while sagittarii means archers. So there is no way of reading this as referring to crossbowmen alone- the ban is either against both crossbowmen and archers, or it's against slingers and archers and doesn't mention crossbows at all.
Some commentators suggest that this canon is intending to prohibit archery contests- similarly, Canon 14 of the council condemns tournaments. Others point out that at the time of the council, the Pope was at war with King Roger of Sicily, whose armies employed large numbers of Muslim archers (not crossbowmen). The canon means that the Papal armies could shoot at Roger's Muslim soldiers, but Roger's Christian officers would be excommunicated if they ordered their men to shoot back...
A crossbow has several advantages, but it's main advantage is NOT power or armor piercing ability. That is likely a myth perpetuated by armchair historians with poor grasp of physics.
The main advantage of a crossbow is that it's easy to use. Richard Lionheart, the English king, was famously killed by a boy wielding a crossbow. You need no more than 2 weeks to be proficient with a crossbow. To do that with an English longbow you'd need 7 years.
There are various methods of drawing a crossbow that don't require great strength. Here's a (not exhaustive! Missing is for example latchet crossbow.) list of 9 ways to draw a crossbow:
In the video, Tod Cutler shows 9 mechanisms used to span a crossbow, some of them require a specially modified crossbow and some don't. Crucially, he shows the numbers for mechanical advantage. Keep in mind the input number will vary. Cranequin is an amazing mechanism, but you only use a single hand. A windlass doesn't have such an impressive ratio, but you can use both hands. A belt may let you use your back muscles as well.
Videos of Joe Gibbs, a 170lb man who can draw a 200lb longbow, show how much effort it is. In one of the videos - I can't locate which one it is - he explains it's no coincidence medieval illustrations show people bending forward when drawing a bow. He draws this way and it lets him put a little more extra into the arrow.
Crossbow can be kept loaded for a long time, and you can line up your shot. This is especially important in sieges. Also, they have a controlled release. My observation is that missile weapons evolved to have more and more controlled release over the ages. Slings and atlatls required lots of skill to use, bow is a bit more controlled, crossbow even more controlled (less things to mess up). Slings were even more powerful than bows but even more training was required.
======================
Now to the power issue. The myth is that they hit extra hard. A light crossbow (loaded by hands, or using a goat's foot lever) actually has power comparable to a short bow. Something like 60-80lbs. Witness a nominally 350lbs failing to penetrate a steel helmet:
Can a 350lb Medieval Crossbow Penetrate Steel Helmets? (16 / 14ga)
Why? The answer is short power stroke. Just because a bow or crossbow can be drawn with a certain force doesn't mean they impart that force to the arrow! Power stroke is the distance between the end of the bowstring, when fully loaded, and between the front of the bow. Crossbows are inefficient when it comes to transferring energy, especially the ones made using medieval technology and metallurgy. Steel bows are nowhere near as flexible as good wood or modern alloys. This was proven time and again using a chronometer (projectile speed meter).
Heavy crossbows, meaning those loaded with a windlass, hit about as hard as a war longbow, which is 100-120lbs. My numbers are from Tod's Workshop youtube channel.
Both a longbow and a heavy crossbow are strong enough to pierce mail armor - piercing is actually its weakness. Mail is good against slashing blades and blunt objects. Even a light crossbow punctures mail. But they fail spectacularly at puncturing plate:
It is 14/15 century, so pretty late medieval tech (Swiss). Crossbows don't get bigger than that. It's practically a very mobile siege weapon.
Another downside of short power stroke is that the crossbow bolt (arrow) accelerates much more rapidly than a bow arrow. So it must be sturdier to withstand the forces, which is why bolts were so thick. A thick projectile has more air resistance and worse armor penetration.
So yes, crossbow is the RPG weapon, but in the sense of "Role Playing Games" and not "Rocked Propelled Grenade".
And here is how much of expertise you need to make crossbows the medieval way:
A Castle Fit For Fighting | Secrets of the Castle (2/5) | Absolute History
I hope I've proved that power was not the advantage of crossbows. The weapon had many advantages, and the basic shape of the weapon and its trigger is used to this day in rifles because it's so good.
If power is what you're after, check out staff slings (Fustibalus). This thing is SCARY, it cracks coconuts at a distance.
This is to give you an idea that crossbows of similar draw weight can vary wildly with their projectile energy. Note the composite crossbow used wood / great horn and it had much longer bow arms.
The 160lb draw weight longbow in the Tod Cutler / Joe Gibbs mythbusting video managed 123 Joules (10m from target) and 109 Joules (25m from target). Arrow weight was 80gram.
And the staff sling I linked above managed 107 Joules with a 3000grain (194gram) stone.
> And Western knights did not like it. Their armor protected them from most weapons they would face with the exception of the longbow, a weapon that took years to learn and decades to master. But crossbows could slice right through the armor at greater range than even a longbow, and shooters could be trained in hours or days.
I don't think that's true either, plate armor should give good protection against arrows and bolts.
The tradeoffs for crossbows are not as clear as it might appear, and it took much longer for the crossbow to overtake the longbow in medieval Europe than most people imagine. Yes, crossbows have massive draw weights compared to a longbow; but this heavy weight comes with two drawbacks. First it requires a very heavy and less aerodynamically efficient bolt in order to survive the extreme acceleration; this provides plenty of close up power but means crossbow bolts lose their energy quicker over distance than a longbow. Second the reloading procedure is very slow, a crossbowman can fire about 1/6th as fast as a longbowman, which reduces volume of fire and means that the crossbowman needs some sort of cover while they look down and fiddle with their crossbow. Historically only China used the crossbow heavily, for Europe it was probably more a hunting weapon than anything else for the first ~500 years they were in the region.
The main benefit of the crossbow appears to not be penetration, but ease of use. Training a longbowman takes a lifetime (medieval English Archers had skeletal differences due to the constant training), and effectively requires handing out weapons to your peasants. This is not a good idea if your peasants are in fact, serfs. With a crossbow you can hand them out and train a soldier how to use it in a week or so, and then take the crossbows back later and not worry about them being used against you in a peasant revolt. You simply can't do this with a longbow due to the constant training they need to be effective.
> And Western knights did not like it. Their armor protected them from most weapons they would face with the exception of the longbow, a weapon that took years to learn and decades to master. But crossbows could slice right through the armor at greater range than even a longbow, and shooters could be trained in hours or days.
This description of crossbows trivially defeating armor is not true. Perhaps a crossbow could defeat cheap iron armor at close ranges, but the primary sections of high quality steel armor will be effectively immune to all projectiles; later examples were in fact actually capable of stopping bullets. The real risk was the thinner sections around the groin, shoulders, or face mask, where the armor was typically thin enough to be defeated by either bolt or arrow.
This historical account sounds a bit like a moral panic of the day, not an accurate description of the behavior of armor against crossbow bolts.
People who suggest that knights could be defeated by peasants in one-on-one or even one-on-many combat often overlook that many (or most?) knights spent their time practicing how to kill people in combat. Peasants on the other hand were busy tending to their land or cattle or doing whatever they had to survive. The modern analogy for adult peasant fighting an adult knight would be a bar fight between a random bystander and a UFC fighter. Now imagine the UFC fighter is wearing armor (and is trained to fight in armor) and is equipped with a deadly weapon of his choice (and has been training to fight with it). If you think there is a remote chance for any outcome besides death of the knight’s opponent (also death at the moment and in a form of the knight’s choosing), try going to a local boxing gym (or jiu-jitsu club etc.) and challenging one of their trainers, then multiply the results by 10 (in trainer’s favor).
I can’t imagine how 10+ years of training could not give a knight an infinite advantage even if we equalize the combatants in terms of equipment.
Also knights were training to fight since they were children, so in our hypothetical bar fight the pro-fighter’s skills would be along the lines of those of Floyd Mayweather (who started training when he was 9). Surely the knight may be less gifted, but that matter should really concern other knights and not peasants :)
49 vs 9000 scenario described in the post seems grotesque but I think, limiting the number of slain civilians by knights’ stamina and assuming that any resistance is negligible is more than reasonable.
It's not clear that knightly training was as useful as UFC training. Ineffective martial arts were a big deal for literal decades before the Gracie family came along, I guess because people didn't want to put in a mouth guard and see what happens. How often did the knights actually see combat, as opposed to train for combat, and do non-lethal sparring? The one form of training which is of undoubted utility is group tactics, but it's unclear what the non-mounted training was for this sort of thing for most times/places.
You're also probably discounting what peasant style manual labor (and hobbies, which include beating the shit out of each other with fists, clubs, etc) does for your combat ability. Hand and wrist strength is a huge deal in pre-firearms days, and peasants were at least 3-4 standard deviations stronger in these ways than average people now (really: that much -I've fooled around with building hand strength and it's bonkers how strong people can get in this domain). People basically exerted their strength through simple hafted tools all day; makes them good at exerting their strength through simple hafted tools all day. Regarding group tactics; peasants had lots of games which could have helped them with this. For example, Hurling[0], and I'm sure there was lots of stuff like Calcio Storico[1].
The real advantage the knights had (beyond equipment, like horses and the morale of feeling superior to the peasant) was probably nutrition. They spent most of their downtime hunting, feasting and eating meat, and between wearing heavy armor and their strength oriented workouts, the knights were probably pretty jacked. 50 or 100lbs of muscle and fat and 6-8" of height helps a lot. I don't have references in front of me for this, but David Willoughby talks about some of this in his book, and I'm sure you can see it in skeletons of Nobles versus peasants (aka Nobles will have larger skeletons with 'deformities' at the muscle attachment points).
>> it's unclear what the non-mounted training was for this sort of thing for most times/places.
That would be the Melee [1]:
"Tournaments often contained a mêlée consisting of knights fighting one another on foot or mounted, either divided into two sides or fighting as a free-for-all. "
Knights in different places at different times saw combat at different rates. If you lived on the Scotish borders or the Welsh marches you would be very likely to see combat on a regular basis. Raiding was a way of life for both sides... England was probably relatively unusual in having a relatively stable core for a relatively long time, but even then civil strife was not uncommon, and wars were fought as soon as either side could afford them. I think that a medieval knight that didn't take martial training really seriously risked being killed pretty promptly. On the other hand I guess that there was a large random element and there may have been a bit of "it makes no real difference so sod it" in their attitude, I don't suppose we will ever know because it seems that there was no real attempt to codify and share the knowledge - it was an oral tradition.
Block weights, sledgehammer levers, captains of crush grippers, fat grip barbells/dumbbells; even a large bucket of water and a pair of pliers. Brookfield's books are considered canonical, and everyone who is anyone (I'm not anyone) in grip is on grip board[0]. I was first made aware of it looking at this dude's geoshitties website[1], which is mercifully still around and a great beginners resource.
To sell you on it a bit: if you've lifted for ~10 years you've probably hit your biological peak on the big exercises, and you've gone into some kind of maintenance mode, or are concentrating more on strength endurance, or rotating through peak efforts on different kinds of strength, or working around inevitable injuries or whatever. Either way, a man gets bored, and a large part of the appeal of strength training is the feeling of making progress. Various forms of hand strength; there's basically infinite potential there. Leonardo used to bend horseshoes, and it's a seemingly impossible feat I think most men are capable of with some training. It's also something available to old people who might not be able or willing to pull 5 wheels on the deadlift any more. You can, of course, injure your hands or forearms, but your chances of being crippled by it are fairly low. The other thing about it; you can train a fair amount (unlike big lifts) without blowing out your cortisol, but you get that intense triumphant grrrrrrr ogre nerve energy from doing it that you do after a max effort lift. Also it looks cool and chicks and small children dig it when you do seemingly impossible feats.
Anyway, peasants who hoed their crops and lifted bricks all day were fucking STRONG in the hands. Probably stronger than most nobles in that regard.
Seriously, much, much thanks. My training is bodyweight exclusively (Convict Conditioning), so, I have relatively weak wrists and forearms.I have hit a pullup plateau (weights are expensive around my parts, and the gym is COVID-closed.), so these tips should be a real help.
Decent program, but try to get some lower back work in there. That's an investment you absolutely won't regret. Sandbags work and are cheap; big rocks too. Bridges if nothing else.
Medieval knights were typically very trim and fit; we have existing texts extolling knights to not over eat and go outside and exercise with stones. While kings performing the role of general tended to be fat, the actual men at arms up front doing the dirty work were probably in fantastic shape. There are historical accounts of knights in armor being capable of climbing siege ladders like a pair of monkey bars while wearing their armor.
hmmm so monkey bars with 40-60lbs load. That's really impressive and something you have to actually train for.
I guess they did train that movement specifically (in armor etc.), because it's not something you could just randomly do on a whim even if you are very strong. Definitely not something you would WANT to do on a whim if you can fall down to your death and also have to be in good enough shape after to fight (which makes this particularly crazy).
Damn, considering that they were also trained grapplers, those must have been one hell of sparring partners.
I always think that the people now that become martial arts champions due to genetics, skill, training etc would be the king's champions 800 years ago. EG: Stipe Miocic would be the William Marshall equivalent - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Marshal,_1st_Earl_of_P...
Crossbows do not fare as effectively against plate armor as video games make you believe. They fire slowly (2rpm) and only work up close; they're only going to be effective in a mass group of crossbowmen standing in a prepared defensive position, otherwise it will be a very short and one sided battle.
Mindset would likely have played a big part, and battle then vs battle now were very different things. A peasant could absolutely kill a knight but probably not in battle, and the opportunity to do so would be unlikely to arise because the knight would probably not be in a position to be ambushed. For most peasantry the very thought of going after a knight would also be almost unimaginable.
Seems like a not-unreasonable comparison today would be "could a civilian kill an armored vehicle?"
Huge thing is mindset- one thing the Total War series got extremely right was shock value and the ability to win battles by routing opponents. Getting charged with a horse would be terrifying (speaking from semi-experience, I've been charged by both bull moose and cattle). Nevermind the animal also having someone on top of it armed to the teeth, I can easily understand running away in terror.
From my amateur research, this is one of the reasons the Romans were so effective- they weren't always better armed than their opponents, but their culture and training promoted better cohesion. Whereas in the scenario of a medieval peasant facing a knight, even negating the shock value of being charged by mounted troops the knight likely just has far more experience in battle and is less likely to rout. Every peasant revolt I've read about seemed to end with the nobles riding the fleeing peasants down and stabbing them in the backs. Makes one reconsider the modern connotation of the word 'noble', although maybe it was a bit of a euphemism even back then. I know chivalry was much more of an ideal than a creed people actually followed.
My impression is that chivalry was more about relations between nobles than anything to do with peasants.
Feudal lords have pretty much always taken whatever liberties they like with the local people: rape, theft, property destruction, murder, torture, kidnapping, ...
Medieval knights were little different than the thug soldiers of any modern criminal gang, except less checked by state power.
Barbara Tuchman’s “A Distant Mirror” portrays feudal wars as essentially raids to kill some of your neighbor’s peasants rather than your neighbor (who was most likely your relative)
Nobility was nobility because they did stuff that didn't get them (directly) paid.
Defense, research, some higher level medicine, engineering, etc...
They would get money from rents, but were expected to spend that money in weapons, equipment for their civilian profession if they had any (for example building a telescope) etc...
And of course it worked MOST of the time, but not ALL the time, sometimes you had people that became infamous, like that "vampire" lady that killed a ton of random people to bathe in their blood...
Yet at Morgarten the Swiss massacred a Habsburg force. Armoured knights need an open battlefield to be effective, in crowded terrain a force made up of peasant fighters equipped with polearms is clearly superior.
Still, with a dagger and skill, you could penetrate allmost all armor.
Not very helpful in 1 vs 1 for the peasant, but in the chaos of the battlefield, very possible. And like others have mentioned: with a polearm and skill, much better chances for the peaseant.
A disciplined force of polearm carriers could have (and did) defeat full armored knights. But there is the greates difference: a peasant usually was not in the position to receive military training at all, while the knights were trained for war since being childs.
Knights aren't gladiators. Full armor is effective in the context of a larger fight.
Individually, a knight on foot isn't catching anyone and can probably be poked until exhausted with any stick longer than whatever weapon he's carrying.
Mounted, someone in the ground has little to no chance at all if the horse is capable of moving. On clear ground, the horse is the weapon.
From the wiki page on Agincourt:
"Recent heavy rain made the battle field very muddy, proving very tiring to walk through in full plate armour. The French monk of St. Denis describes the French troops as "marching through the middle of the mud where they sank up to their knees. So they were already overcome with fatigue even before they advanced against the enemy". The deep, soft mud particularly favoured the English force because, once knocked to the ground, the heavily armoured French knights had a hard time getting back up to fight in the mêlée. Barker states that some knights, encumbered by their armour, actually drowned in their helmets.["
Only if the civilian has a rpg or IED and then he probably would not be a civilian anymore, but a specialized guerilla fighter, if he manages to take out a modern tank.
OTOH you can also trap an armored vehicle into a hole or mud pit, and the people inside can't stay in there forever, there is also such a thing as a molotov cocktail.
That’s not so crazy, is it? “Civilian” is used in the thought experiment to refer to an expected level of training, experience, and equipment. You wouldn’t reasonably expect a “civilian” in this context to have an RPG or an attack aircraft. The clear point of the thought experiment is “would a civilian be able to kill an armored vehicle with the level of training, experience, and equipment that would reasonably be expected of a civilian in this context?”
In some countries, most civilians are former soldiers.
Knowing how to destroy an armored vehicle is not a common knowledge around where I live.
It is given for granted however that around the world people are creative, can learn new things, and generally could figure out how to make explosives.
Wouldn't a more apt comparison be someone armed with a 9mm pistol trying to take on a trained soldier with advanced anti-ballstic armor and plating, and an accurate rifle?
No, the comparison to an APC (armored personnel carrier) is apt- knights were armored enough to be nearly invulnerable to the weaponry a peasant would have access to. To compare to something modern, I'm sure enough street protestors would be able to disable an APC and kill the soldiers inside at least some of the time, but the soldiers in the APC could likely win the 40:9000 battle cited in the article. Remember that knights had the height of military technology, this was an age where any iron tool was still extremely valuable.
The only thing that would hamper modern soldiers is that from everything I have read medieval knights weren't possessed with any qualms about killing; life in general was much more violent than we experience now.
For more reading about this mindset, acoup.blog [0] has an excellent review of Bertrand de Born's work. What struck me is just how casual violence is treated, and that war is a treated as the expected normal condition. The peasantry definitely did not hold these views, but given that the nobility had a vast armament advantage and copious experience in killing I doubt many modern soldiers would be quite so callous. The only modern exception I can think of is child soldiers; but they have been subjected to abuse specifically to train them to be able to commit horrific acts. Maybe I am wrong, but I don't think most soldiers in modern militaries would easily be able to slaughter their countrymen with quite the same abandon. This is speculation, but I suspect that the nobles were able to do this because they viewed the peasantry as semi-subhuman; see the American antebellum south for the types of atrocities that that mindset enables.
Tiennanmen square would be a case in point. I believe that they brought in troops from other areas, because they were alienated enough from the citizens of the city, and the local garrison wouldn't have shot their own neighbours and families.
> No, the comparison to an APC (armored personnel carrier) is apt- knights were armored enough to be nearly invulnerable to the weaponry a peasant would have access to.
No. A knight prone on the ground was very easy to kill very quickly - just stick a dagger through the visor. There is nothing comparable a civilian today can do to an APC.
Additionally, a single knight on a horse was not that hard to take down using relatively easily-available polearms, at least to a group of peasants. It doesn't scale down linearly - 40:9000 is a very different matter than 1:200, because a charge of 40 mounted knights is still inescapable death to the part of the enemy force they're charging at. A single knight would be much less terrifying even to a relatively group of peasants.
Lob a molatoff cocktail from above and hit the engine intakes and you can get a Mobility kill.
Armour in built up areas is very risky with out infantry support and the APC's would not be just driving around with out having dismounts supporting them.
This, or spray paint in windows and periscopes. Or, smokey fires in air inlets, crews carry gas masks but not hours of supplemental O2.
Modern armor isn't invulnerable, but as I suggested it isn't easy to take out and likely would achieve similar to 40:9000 or worse in confrontations with civilians. Thankfully armor rolling over civilians like that isn't common enough for me to pull actual statistics, so we have to guess at efficacy compared to knights fighting peasants.
I guess that in the days that most jobs were either be being a soldier working for the local lord or a peasant in some random village had naturally a profound effect about life and death.
The mount was not as heavily armored, however, as modern armor vehicles are, and extremely vulnerable to pikemen (as many other commenters here have brought up: the landsknechts).
Back to the analogy, a peasant (in the modern sense) is unlikely going to be as able to obtain an anti-tank or armor piercing rounds as easily as a peasant (medieval sense) could pick up a pike.
You need a disciplined pike wall that is so cohesive that it does not break! You dont get magical superpowers by just picking up a pike (like you wont become a good programmer by acquiring Borland Turbo C++). You need to train with your comrades.
The same applied to an armoured knight, but it's hard to trap a mounted warrior when you're on foot, just as it would be hard to get a tank stuck unless you know what you're doing.
I'm certain that more than one knight died locked inside a burning barn back in the days.
That's actually why knights armor was shiny. Remember that this is before chrome and stainless steel; shiny armor means that the armor is steel and maintained at high expense. The knowledge that you've got to go against someone wearing the best armor that the era can provide is going to be a huge blow to morale.
At the famous Battle of Agincourt peasants slaughtered thousands of knights. It was a decisive blood bath against a vastly superior force that allowed Henry V’s conquest of France. This is confirmed by eye witness records both French and English.
Ehhh yes, but this gets complicated and interesting in the details. Have you read Keegan on Agincourt? Short story, the popular version of French knights getting bogged down in the mud and shot to pieces with arrows is mostly false, but the English peasants did play a critical role.
Far from being mowed down by longbowmen (although they absolutely would have taken a toll, especially on horses), the French cavalry was turned back by the stakes the archers planted in their positions. The stakes were likely mingled with the archers in a kind of thicket, rather than the fence you see in movies or video games, preventing the french knights from seeing the danger until the archers fell back and it was too late.
The French second wave, armored foot, was essentially invulnerable to arrows. But the French piled into dense columns to attack the English men-at-arms (they had no interest in fighting peasant archers, there’s no glory or loot in it). So the front of the column is in big trouble and is being pushed into the English spears by the men behind them, and those in the rear have no idea what’s happening up front so they keep pushing forward. This is how people die at rock concerts or on black friday.
Mostly out of ammo at this point, the English archers come out to gang up on stragglers at the edges of the columns. This is the “flank attack” that eye witnesses report. The peasants certainly didn’t charge the flanks of the columns en masse, they would have been slaughtered. But they could definitely pick off those who tried to escape the press out the sides. Without an escape route, the French columns turn into a panicked rout. This is where most of the French losses happen, either stampeded by their own or cut down or captured by the pursuing English knights.
The English don’t chase them far, however, because there’s still a second line of French men-at-arms which hasn’t been committed to the battle, and the English have a large number of captives to keep an eye on. In the event, the French don’t renew the attack, and send out their heralds to parley.
So yes, the English won a major victory and the peasants played a big role, but the popular version misses the actual mechanics of the battle. “Conquest of France” is also rather strong. Immediately after the battle Henry turned around and went home to London. His later advantage is more down to the long term consequences of the sheer amount of the French aristocracy killed in the battle rather than any immediate gains.
Something like 6000 soldiers were taken captive and the captives began to outnumber the entirety of English forces, so the English chose to execute them all as a necessary means of security, but really many of the archers were slaughtering them anyways as a means to loot the bodies.
Yeah I left this episode out bc the post was turning into a novel. Henry was spooked by a raid on the English baggage train, and the prospect of being caught between the prisoners in the rear and a renewed French attack in front.
As horrifying as the incident is, Keegan at least finds it unlikely that the prisoners were actually massacred wholesale. When you look at the actual mechanics of how such a thing would work, especially with the rest of the French army still on the field and watching, a slaughter of 6000 prisoners becomes really implausible.
For space I won’t quote Keegan’s reasoning, but here’s an excerpt from his conclusion:
> “What seems altogether more likely, therefore, is that Henry’s order, rather than bring about the prisoners’ massacre, was intended by its threat to terrorize them into abject inactivity ... Some would have been killed in the process, and quite deliberately, but we need not reckon their number in thousands, perhaps not even in hundreds.”
So while we know from witnesses that this did happen, anything about why is going to involve some conjecture. But from what I recall, there are a few reasons.
The English army was arranged in a single line, with large groups of archers alternating with small groups of men at arms. For the men at arms (on both sides), combat was primarily about winning personal glory, secondarily about scoring some loot. The only way to get either is by attacking the enemy men at arms. No personal upside in attacking yeoman archers (other than, uh, maybe winning the battle. Whoops.)
So you naturally funnel towards the enemy you want to fight. Remember these guys aren’t marching in formation like Romans or early modern pikemen. It’s a loosely organized mass of individuals.
On top of that, the survivors of the cavalry attack on the flanks retreat through the infantry, throwing them into disorder. This also helps condense the infantry as they try to make way for the cavalry.
On top of that, getting shot at by clouds of arrows sucks even if realistically you’re not in a lot of danger. Getting out from in front of the archers would feel safer.
Plus, even if you’re a smart knight who knows you should be attacking the archers, that doesn’t do you any good unless everyone else comes too. Getting caught our on your own is how you get ganged up on, knocked down into the mud, and stabbed through the visor by some dirt farmer with a dagger. Which is exactly what happened to the guys on the edges of the columns. So you stick with the crowd. Once you’re in the crowd, it becomes packed too tightly for you to change your mind.
At the front of the columns, witnesses report the English stepping back at the last moment, causing the leading french to wrong foot their attack and stumble. So it’s chaotic, they haven’t smashed through the English line, but the guys further back have no way of knowing that and keep pressing forwards.
As an aside, I didn’t mean to make it sound like the spears were a particularly English thing. Most on both sides would’ve had some kind of polearm. In mass combat a sword is often a backup weapon.
The geography created a dense and inescapable column of a battlefield. The French army was huge so once you started marching forward you couldn't stop because there were people behind you marching forward. Soldiers were literally pushed onto the wooden stakes because of the crowd and many others were either trampled to death or drowned in the mud while being stepped on.
Most of the English soldiers who killed knights at Agincourt were longbowmen shooting from a distance and protected by both terrain and a line of sharpened stakes that prevented the French cavalry from charging them. That is not the kind of direct confrontation that the article is talking about.
It was at a distance at first, but towards the end of the battle the longbowmen gradually advanced into point-blank range and then, as they ran out of arrows, switched to whatever melee weapons they had to mob the incapacitated French men-at-arms and knights.
Though it's certainly true that the historical English longbowman wasn't the usual 'peasant' stereotype, given that they were generally landowners (rather than tenant farmers) and were actually legally required to take a certain amount of regular practice weekly with the bow.
https://www.forbes.com/2010/06/16/legal-humor-archery-opinio... says that the English were required to practice the longbow starting before the 13th Century. In 1541 every man 60 and under was to have a longbow and practice it. Many games were then banned for possibly distracting men from archery.
Interestingly there's no information on where the bows were to come from but it sounds like the typical longbowman would have the income to buy it himself.
Serfdom was on its last legs in England by this stage. I believe there were plenty of landowners who practiced the longbow but a majority would have been yeomen who were tenants of big solid farms, not themselves landowners. England was almost the first place to get rid of serfdom and a peasantry both, though the Netherlands may have it beat. Remember we’re on the verge of the Reformation. These are quite urbanized bourgeois societies by the 1400s.
As far as I am aware, most longbowmen at the time were yeomen, a sort of middle class between the landed gentry and the serf class, where they owned their land and thus had the free time and energy to practice and hunt with a longbow.
The Battle of the Golden Spurs would be a better example, with several French nobles (such as the Marshal of France and the Constable of France!) ultimately losing their lives to pikemen. All the more surprising because this was pretty much the first battle in Medieval history where the side with the most knights lost (quite badly).
Admittedly, the Flemish side wasn't exactly peasantry but largely townspeople in guilds, although in terms of the classic three-tier model (nobility, clergy, peasantry), they would have fallen into the last class.
But it matters---the same point could be made about the Battle of Poitiers, in which the fancy French noble knights were crushed, mostly by longbowmen. It's silly to ask the question of whether peasants could kill knights without considering the actual ways peasants killed knights...
The English peasants were a special lot. England had an archery mandate going back to at least the 13th century so we're not talking about random untrained peasants. Also lots of things went right for the English and wrong for the French at Agincourt.
longbows had a big role in the battle of Agincourt. It was part of a wider switch from very expensive defensive armor and warriors on expensive horses (that were eating a lot of grain) towards stuff that could kill at a distance. The middle ages isn't one monolithic period, it's quite a complex business. See https://www.britannica.com/technology/military-technology/Th...
What this article seems to barely touch upon is that the peasants spent most of their time eking out a living, the rich had free time and a culture of practicing their fighting skills at length, and from a young age, too. I would even say that the equipment was a secondary advantage, though still significant.
A peasant was also very likely to be malnourished, while someone in a position to have been practicing for battle from a young age was likely to have been very well nourished in comparison, especially during critical childhood years. An average military aristocrat probably had 10+ cm of height and 10+ kg of weight advantage on an average peasant.
It’s not just weaponry, most of fighting is nutrition, I’m surprised the article doesn’t discuss that. Given that the article says the knights and their weaponry were correlated to wealth and power, I would expect the knights to be better fed than the peasants as well.
That might be possible, but is it likely? A knight is basically a medieval super-soldier: an individual with a huge amount of ongoing personal+state investment going into their ability to project power on the field.
Even if they're also a feudal lord who lives within their own holdings (and therefore someone who's not beholden to anyone around them, only to a distant king) everyone working for them is putting a lot of work into keeping the knight's equipment, their horse, etc. maintained and ready to go.
Wouldn't those same people push the knight themselves — for their own sakes! — to stay fit, as another kind of "maintenance"? Wouldn't there be mass resentment within a lazy knight's power structure, that would lead to said power structure toppling or mutiny-ing?
Fat, certainly, but being fat doesn't imply you can't swing a sword on a horse. You can have a lot of core strength and good arms, but if you eat a lot of puddings, the muscle will be covered in enough mass that you'll just look fat. (Especially in a portrait you're just sitting for, rather than flexing for.)
As for incompetent knights, I'm genuinely confused: how did they survive in the role for any length of time? (Especially when the only talent pool they would have to recruit underlings from are the very same people they're oppressing. I always figured competence at protecting the outlying villages—where everyone's families live—during invasion, was kinda the reason anyone bothered to work for them at all, rather than towns responding to recruitment attempts exactly the same as invasion attempts, with stoning, boiling oil from the rooftops, etc.)
An incompetent knight can survive for a long period on bluster alone. Think of modern bosses who have no acumen at technical or logistical concerns but are successful in bullying underlings. The business does not fail instantly in most such circumstances, rather it just falls into a gradual decline.
The villagers, on the other hand, are used to invaders coming through. Their condition is likely to remain poor either way: The knight is more likely to come through after something happened, rather than preventing it from happening. Most of the daily decision making is up to the community.
The knight's recruitment efforts can always come with the promise of gaining wealth and status, which will always encourage some young folks, even if the knight is a bad boss who plans no real rewards. Records that uncover his lies are hard to acquire and most of what you learn will come from rumor instead.
> how did they survive in the role for any length of time?
Not all knights saw that much action. I agree though that they had strong incentives, besides survival in battle, to be at least defensibly competent.
As to those incentives -- they had a multi-generation arrangement with the sovereign: to supply a certain number of mounted men when he called for it, maybe determined by the size of landlord they were, and in return the king let them keep dominating economic activity in their usually-rural area. The knight held the purse strings and could extract as much as he felt prudent from his tenants (farmers etc).
But the knight would employ Men-at-Arms. These were the guys with what we think of today as 'Knight Skills,' but no land/title/purse. They'd be taken care of, and they'd definitely try to keep their boss alive. Or sometimes an older knight might send the required men without going himself. (This varies a lot by time period of course).
So on the one hand, they didn't have to do superhero stuff if they didn't want to.
On the other hand -- their whole reason to exist was intensely martial; the structure of society reflected the fact that folks riding horse-tanks dominated all of civilization. There were good reasons for someone with a coveted horse-tank position to, yes, be able to be ride, be at least minimally competent, and show up to risk their lives when the king calls for it, or else risk losing their privileged position.
> the reason anyone bothered to work for them at all, rather than towns responding to recruitment attempts exactly the same as invasion attempts, with stoning, boiling oil from the rooftops, etc
Well, the knight owned the siege-proof fortresses in the area; that's one of those things they did well in feudal times, picking geographical strong points for fortresses.
The knight also owned the town people lived in too, the farms, houses, etc. His family got them way back when kings started deciding that they didn't want the town to send 5 random foot soldiers when he called -- he'd rather have 1 professional, well-equipped horseman with mail, shield, lance etc, and if you could make that happen he'd just give you your neighbor's stuff to keep making it happen in perpetuity.
What does that mean? This claim seems too ambiguous to be meaningful.
Of course there were a lot for fat/incompetent knights across all times and all countries.
More interesting questions are:
Was the average knight fat?
How common were the?
How effective were fat/incompetent knights on the battlefield?
On the other hand participating (and surviving) in just one real battle would set the knight miles above anyone who is just physically strong from working the land.
That might be possible, but is it likely? A knight is basically a medieval super-soldier: an individual with a huge amount of ongoing personal+state investment going into their ability to project power on the field.
This isn't really correct. Most knights didn't have a huge incomes (if they did they would become Lords).
A Knight wasn't a military position - it was primarily a class and status designation, which came with some military obligations. These could be met by supplying another person to your lord to do the fighting for you.
Often a Knight would supply their lord with their younger son for example, since their older son would be the heir.
To become a knight in the medieval times in the UK you needed an income of 40 pounds a year[1] which converts to around 30,000 pounds/year these days.[2]
> Wouldn't there be mass resentment within a lazy knight's power structure, that would lead to said power structure toppling or mutiny-ing?
Yes, indeed peasant revolts were a thing. And a lot of most knights "fighting" involved hunting down rebellious peasants armed with sticks.
Nutrition in childhood, especially early childhood, is extremely critical to development. The average person historically was remarkably short, generally because of childhood malnourishment. Simply being properly nourished in childhood would have led to a huge height and weight advantage (also probably considerable advantages in brain development). Even into the 18th century the average height of an officer in the British military was about 8in more than that of the enlisted men.
On top of that a knight would have eaten a lot more fat, meat, and vegetables than a peasant, who would have lived almost entirely on bread. This wouldn’t have left the peasant totally protein-starved because it was bread made from whole grains, but a knight would have been getting much better returns on their exercise throughout life due to their more varied diet.
> The average person historically was remarkably short, generally because of childhood malnourishment.
I believe the average member of the House of Commons was visibly shorter than the members of the House of Lords at least through WWII. Certainly Americans were obviously taller than Europeans until after WWII. Even American slaves were taller and children were generally malnourished until about seven when they became capable of working. Adult height seems to have been unaffected reflecting just how rich the US was comparatively. Complete unfeeling bastards didn’t malnourish children enough to do permanent damage.
The below article makes mention of a fact that may complicate things though - big strong slaves were worth more. Presumably slave owners had this in mind so had an ulterior motive for feeding slaves better.
Super horrible, but consider that slaves were incredibly valuable. The middle class of farmers in the antebellum south would barely have been able to afford one, the plantation owners were stupendously wealthy. This, in part, explains why the south was able to wield such outsize political influence.
Very bleak, but slave owners had a large economic incentive to make sure their slaves were fit for work (although that didn't cause qualms on other, more brutal forms of mistreatment). The only way they treated them well was in providing food, but that wasn't due to kindness but more from the same motivation to feed a team of draft horses well. It's tough reading, but some of the ledgers kept by plantation owners really drive the point home that they viewed slaves more akin to livestock than people. And they somehow justified what they were doing as christian and moral.
I believe it must have come from Height, Health and History by Roderick Floud, but I can't find a digital copy of that book to link, despite it being 30 years old. The closest thing I could find is another work citing Floud, and only with regard to the difference in height at the beginning of the 19th century. It gives "nearly 6 inches taller", but note that it's comparing 14-year-olds in 1800, when nutrition for the lower classes was on the upswing.
> Floud et al. also showed that men who grew up in urban areas were shorter than men who grew up in rural areas, and that there were significant differences in the
heights of men and boys from different socioeconomic backgrounds. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, 14-year-old boys attending the Royal Military Academy at Sandhurst were nearly six inches taller than their counterparts in the Marine Society
Would the knight even have access to “bad” carbs / sugar in significant enough amounts to make them so fat that they’d be unfit for combat? It’s not like they can just get another carton of Pringles to finish off the dinner
The longbow armies of Wales and England were made up of yeomen, who were certainly well into the upper end of medieval society. There certainly weren't very many of them. There were only 5000-6000 at the Battle of Agincourt, and the loss of ~2500 of them 14 years later at the Battle of Patay crippled the ability of the English to field a substantial longbow army through to the end of the Hundred Years War.
Doesn’t matter how much you work in the field if you are not fed properly. You cannot build muscle without protein. Knights worked out a lot and eat well.
Farmer strength is incredible. I remember rough housing with a farmer friend as a teenager. I was pretty athletic and he was smaller (~15kg lighter) but probably twice as strong as I was. Functional strength. He was basically a teenager with old man strength.
Might depend on how far the knights/armies were from home, what their logistics capabilities were, or how much they could take from the local peasants or environment.
Peasants ate very well, they had to, in order to work the fields.
Salmon were considered peasant food, a peasant would go by the river and fish one up for lunch. Then probably eat some kind of pottage, and bread. Maybe eggs.
I'd wager peasants can be tough as fuck, it's only question of how well trained and equipped they are for fighting.
Peasants by and large ate pretty poorly, and their diet consisted mostly of bread. They also had an unfortunate tendency to under-nourish children during lean times, because the adults still needed to be well fed so that they could farm. This is the reason why the average height of a European man has increased more than 6 inches since the Middle Ages.
Slaughtered hogs? Maybe twice a year in a good year on feast days. Seriously, the parent comment was spot-on, by-and-large they lived on the edge of starvation. It wasn't salmon for lunch everyday (in most cases, even every month). >75% of their diet was bread.
Sure, 'artisinal'... have you ever chipped a tooth from poorly ground flour or rock inclusions? The bread was more wholesome than what is avaliable in the supermarket now, but how many people outside of developing countries eat a majority grain diet? Bread was the main foodstuff simply because grain stores much more easily than anything else. Salt-curing was only avaliable to the rich, since even salt was tremendously expensive.
Perhaps my impression of the state of agricultural yields [0] and fealty payments is incorrect, but I don't think most peasants had enough food to be considered well nourished by today's standards. Sure some grew their own food, but the labor was much more involved than today and they didn't get to keep all of the food.
Surprised there is no specific mention of the misericorde (a long, narrow dagger that could get between the gaps in armor plates or the holes in visors): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Misericorde_(weapon)
That's an expensive non-food-producing piece of metal for an average medieval peasant to have lying around. Much more likely for your average knight to have one though, and as the link says it was used by Polish nobility.
A Distant Mirror covered some peasant/commoner attempts at rebellion and they seemed to lead to same disastrous results, mostly because of a lack of discipline.
Here's a bit about the Battle of Roosebeke:
>As French lances pierced and axes hacked at the solid mass of bodies, many of whom lacked helmet or cuirass, the dead piled up in heaps. French foot soldiers, penetrating between the men-at-arms, finished off the fallen with their knives, “with no more mercy than if they had been dogs.” Under the attack of the Bourbon-Coucy wing, the Flemish rear turned and fled, throwing away their weapons as they ran. Philip van Artevelde, fighting in the front ranks, tried to rally them, but from his position could exercise no effective command. He lacked the assurance of the Black Prince at Poitiers to retain control from a hilltop above the battle. Borne backward by the mass as the rout spread, he was trampled and killed under the feet of his own forces, as was his banner-bearer, a woman named Big Margot.
It seems to me that a few peasants, or a group of them would ‘absolutely’ be able to defeat a knight in battle in a theoretical sense. You really only need to drag them off their horse and stab them.
But the situation is not like that in any real life instance, as the described situation in France depicts.
What the peasants are lacking isn’t so much arms and equipment, as discipline and organisation.
I think it was Metatron or maybe Shadiversity on youtube talked about this once and I remember one point in favour of the Knights is that they dedicate a lot of their lives to training while peasants don't, so one advantage that Knights have is that they are simply better trained, many having trained from a young age.
Surprised it doesn't mention Hussites https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hussites. Peasants (given they were armed with fire arms, one of the first large scale uses of firearms) defeated five(!!!) crusades.
Well the landsknechts of Germany and Swiss Pikeman were the ones who took down the heavily armored knights of the late Middle Ages. Most of them were from common stock. Probably not in a one on one fight though.
It makes one wonder how the modern equals would do?
Yes, we have street fights / protests between "soldiers" and pedestrians. Each equipped with their standard tools - lopsided as they may be. The question becomes more of a matter of context for a modern battle.
What is a modern knight and what is a modern peasant in 2020 and also, what locale?
(We could also use a booklist for this discussion - I keep bringing back scenes from Pillars of the Earth)
I wonder if modern peasants can fight and win against the knights.
You can't own a knife in many countries without a license let alone a gun. It's all tracked. There are targeted missiles, drones, autonomous guns, surveillance, radar, bombs, tear gas, tasers, tanks, bullet and knife proof clothing, exoskeleton, etc available to the knights. Knights are many times more organized than they have ever been in history.
Knights still have to be fed and armed with the taxes of peasants, and they'll follow the orders of the societal structure that funnels them those taxes. You protect yourself by getting involved in politics and shaping the economic and cultural power balance of your society so you don't get to a point where you need to use violence against state security forces. Once you reach that point, you've already lost.
> You can't own a knife in many countries without a license
What kind of bullshit propaganda is that? There isn't a single country in the world that requires a license to "own a knife".
> let alone a gun. It's all tracked. There are targeted missiles, drones, autonomous guns, surveillance, radar, bombs, tear gas, tasers, tanks, bullet and knife proof clothing, exoskeleton, etc available to the knights.
However, there's a lots of things relatively freely available to peasants that can be turned into a bomb capable of killing any knight who's not in a tank. And even a tank can have a bad time in a city full of hostile peasants.
> Knights are many times more organized than they have ever been in history.
This is a the big one. Organization really matters to make the technological advantage count. And it ivolves knowing in what situations that advantage wouldn't work well, and avoiding them.
^ mentions: "Civilians are prohibited from possessing knives, machetes, and other bladed weapons officially issued to the police, military, and other official authorities without a special license"
Otherwise there are laws wrt possession of certain "weapon" knifes, and carrying knifes in public; but not mere possession of ordinary knifes. It's also not clear to me it's illegal to own "weapon" knifes kept at home.
modern night would be a standard equiped military soldier from a first world country. modern peasant would be an average civilian from a third world country?
"A scrimmage in a Border Station-
A canter down some dark defile
Two thousand pounds of education
Drops to a ten-rupee jezail.
The Crammer's boast, the Squadron's pride,
Shot like a rabbit in a ride! "
You'd just change "ten-rupee jezail" to a second hand AK
I'm not sure a cheesy short film with a ridiculous choreographed fight scene is the best example of "what a fully trained knight in armour can do". This isn't reality, it's someone's imagination.
Yeah it's cheesy but it's quite accurate that it shows how hard it is to kill someone clad in chain mail and full armour. The bandits are not very well trained although they do try to stab between the plates bit it's still very difficult to do.
Also the guys doing the videos are re enactment pros and yes what they do is a bit theatrical, but other YouTubers specialising in this area have said it's quite legit. I'll link to video when I have a chance
I can believe that individual slashes and stabs are ineffective against metal armor, sure. But this video makes it seem like a knight could take down a whole crowd of enemies by himself. This is what fighting that many people at once actually looks like: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_CmRo7uECEg
Several people knock or drag the victim to the ground while the rest take turns beating him. In the movies when the hero goes to fight 20 dudes, at any given time 18 are standing around doing nothing while he lays waste to them two at a time with flawlessly executed martial arts moves. That's pure theatrics, and no amount of armor or training or general badassery can make it a reality.
The video you linked to is a basically a brawl in the street in the 20th century with non armed combat. Apple to Oranges. I also agree with you about martial arts movie where a single guy takes on 20 people, not very realistic. (however have a look at how a guy can hold off multiple opponents in non armed combat https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X8_zWBQXZj4)
Here we are talking about a fully trained knight in his peak condition with really good armor and sword. The bandits/peasants in the video are not very well protected and don't seem to take advantage of their numbers due to inexperience/fear factor. Also in the video he does fight 3 or 4 people at once and they do try and make him fall to the ground, but again he is trained and knows how to keep his distance and stay upright and he also takes damage.
You could argue that it might be not 100% realistic, but I think it does show the effectiveness of knights. I mean think about it, if a knight could be taken down by a bunch of peasants, why did invest so much time and money on knights and armour.
It's really not that different. Armor and swords or not, you can't fend off vast numbers of opponents by yourself for long. That street fight you posted lasts only a few seconds, it's just that the video has been edited to stretch it out to two minutes.
Taking advantage of their numbers doesn't require experience. Kindergarteners gang up on each other. It's instinct.
> if a knight could be taken down by a bunch of peasants, why did invest so much time and money on knights and armour.
For the same reason we invest in soldiers today. As a group, they can be a formidable force. But if a single one gets mobbed by 20 enemies up close, chances are he's going down no matter how elite or well trained he is.
I'm not sure I understand your argument. Are you saying I should defer to the expertise of the knight in your video? I would, but unfortunately he's not a knight. He's an actor.
no the youtubers, (metatron and skallagrim). They seem to specialize in historical swordfighting, so I think its worth listening to what they have to say on the subject
What is fascinating is that a switch to offensive weapons seem to have helped with bringing about a society with more equal opportunities as compared to feudalism: there was no point to maintain feudalism, when a few mounted and armored warriors could no longer defeat huge crowds of peasants. There were other factors as shortage of working hands due to the great plague, so that they had to pay for labor instead of the usual practice, but i guess you can't reduce anything that big to a single factor, as usual.
In ancient history you had a similar theme: The bronze age came with small elite armies and expensive charriots, later larger crowds of warriors with cheaper arms made of iron defeated them, and that also came with opportunities for more people and more egalitarian religions, more accessible syllabic writing system - lots of things became more inclusive.
Mel Gibsons Apocalypto has some great fight scenes, and probably one of the best foot chase scene on film. The ending scene is a sort of target practice of skilled warriors with a weapon vs an unarmed prisoners given a head start to try and escape. It becomes pretty apparent what a huge advantage a weapon in skilled hands is.
As with so many things I suspect it comes down to leadership and tactics - if you get to choose and prepare the ground a small lightly armed force could definitely defeat a much larger force of heavily armed mounted knights.
The Battle of Loudon Hill (1307) is a good example - look at the map:
This battle was included at the end of the Netflix movie 'Outlaw King', which although it includes a fair number of inaccuracies is perhaps better than most and at least is reasonably close to what happened (which is more than I can say for some comparable more famous movies):
Nice that they mention the brave Flemish peasants ;). Although the picture of the goedendag (=good day) is incorrect!
Flemish myself, in schools we learn about Battle of the Golden Spurs (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_the_Golden_Spurs). It's probably the battle we are most proud of, because us peasants stood up against a fancy French army.
As it was taught to me, we drove the enemy cavalry into a swamp, and were able to use our goedendag (accurate picture here: https://www.liebaart.org/figuren/goedendr.jpg) to push them off their horses and pierce through the chain mail.
1) Use disguises to approach in circumstances where a knight is vulnerable
2) Surprise arson in the middle of the night
3) Pit trap
4) Deadfall trap
With outside resources from wealthy parties interested in influencing the land in which the peasants live, a guerilla war can be sustained for several years.
Crossbows would totally work, but the problem is getting your hands on enough of them. No single person could realistically make a crossbow. You needed materials from several guilds. In practice, peasants would have to capture an armory already stuffed with crossbows.
The Hussite War Wagons had great success against knights, but it was in the era of early firearms.
Hussite Wagon Forts - A Challenge To Heavy Cavalry In The Late Middle Ages | Late Medieval Warfare
I need help understanding how a lance is practically used. Wouldn't you impale one person and immediately lose your lance or fall off your horse trying to hold it?
This is why the church banned the use of crossbows against Christians. It was deemed unfair for a peasant to instantly kill someone who trained all his life.
I was actually trained in ~15th century longsword (modern term) fencing, in the Italian school.
We actually had a drill called the "villains blow"[0] designed to deal with an untrained assailant attempting an overly strong top down blow. The basic story is that a peasant (villain basically means "poor" back in the day) has gotten their hands on a sword and would like to express their displeasure about how their life is going on you. It's scary how effective the drill is, during slow speed training you have to actually fight to slow the weapon down. At speed it'll end an engagement with one blow; someone chopped in the neck tends to stop fighting very quickly. In a sword fight between a trained person and an untrained person, the trained combatant will win convincingly the vast majority of the time.
Beyond that there were fairly complex drills about fighting multiple opponents when unarmored, which we never practiced because it's a logistical nightmare. It can be done, but it's going to be very hard to pull off; you effectively have to move in a way to make your opponents interfere with each other. Doable, but since unarmored longsword fencing is a very high stakes game, chances are even if it works you're leaving with an interesting scar and perhaps fewer fingers than you started with.
One manuscript (I forget which) had some section that basically said this "if you find yourself set upon by five or more peasants while in harness (hard plate), stand as you will and cut them down one by one". It is extremely hard to kill someone wearing full plate armor if they're standing and prepared. You either need overwhelming numbers, specialized weapons designed to defeat hard armor, or they need to be knocked down onto the ground first (there's a reason "he fell" was a euphemism for death in combat). Ideally (if you're not the knight), you'd like to see all three. This is what happened in Agincourt, where freaked out English archers (who wouldn't be ransomed if they lost) swarmed and drowned the exhausted French knights in the mud while beating them to death with hammers for good measure.
As an aside, the difficulty of getting up in armor is vastly overstated[1]. Yes, plate armor is heavy, but any armor that you can't move in is a death trap, plus the vast majority of this stuff was worn by men who would be in fantastic shape, since fighting was their only job. The problem with plate armor isn't that it's impossible to get up in, the problem with plate armor is that it's impossible to get up when you're being opposed. Think less "I can't get up" and more "I can't get up with another guy on top of me trying to kill me". Plus while armor is heavy (50-60lbs isn't unusual), it's not that heavy; for comparison a typical Marine might carry 100-200lbs into Afghanistan.
That is the most stupid comparison I have seen lately in HN. A kid "with a grudge and a stick" could likely never "flip you off your expensive shinny horse" because, well, sticks cannot do that. The AK kid can kill you because, I don't know if you are aware of this, AKs can shoot things from distance.
Also, AKs kill you when a shot hits your head/torso. A stick won't kill you on-hit. Being a knight also meant having proper armor and training.
Of course a kid could kill a knight, say, in their sleep, but in that case being a knight would be irrelevant, and the most appropriate description would be: a kid killed a sleeping person.
> Confidence and determination and unusual resources also made it possible for groups of commoners to assert themselves during the post-plague period. In the 1300s, the Flemish cities organized themselves as disciplined forces and defeated noble-led armies. Bruges, for instance, had several advantages: it was a populous, rich trading city that could afford to resist the traditional ruling class if the right circumstances occurred; and indeed many citizens were willing to put their lives on the line to achieve their own vision of self-government. The townsmen of Flanders even adopted a scary and non-standard weapon, the goedendag – a combination of a short spear and long club. These commoners (many of whom by this time were more prosperous than earlier generations) had distinctive weaponry and a tactical protocol which made them an effective military and political factor.
This refers to the 1302 Battle of the Golden Spurs where an army of footmen prevailed over a French army of knights. That victory was re-appropriated and romanticized in the 19th century as part of the national mythology of the young Belgian nation.
The reality is far more complex and less rosy then how it is put here by the author.
14th century Flanders saw several uprising and rebellions. The count was also a feudal vazal to the French Crown. As such, the King sent several armies to appease the unruly county between 1302 and 1400, each time crushing those same footmen. Mons-en-Pévele, Roosebeke, Cassel are less known names for good reasons.
As far as the French Crown was concerned, the county of Flanders and it's cities were a strategic pawn in a larger European feudal realm dominated by the conflict with England (Hundred's Years War). The wealth of the cities themselves came from the wool trade with England, and the trade with Southern Europe, later on, in particular, with Lombardy. For instance, the French Crown revoking trade with England was a direct cause of the Artevelde rebellion in 1339.
Moreover, the cities themselves were semi-autonomous, held their own local political and economical interests, and were very much feuding with each other, or their liege lord, the Count of Flanders to preserve their own local autonomy, expand their economic interests and the ability to trade without getting excessively taxed by established feudal elites. In reality, those "disciplined forces" were militia's and warbands which were held together by tenuous alliances when facing the French Army; and would openly fight each other when push comes to shove. The Battle of Beverhoutsveld saw the cities of Bruges and Ghent facing each other off, whereas just 40 years prior, those same cities were allies in that same Artevelde rebellion against the French Crown. [1]
The wealth and political power was truly concentrated with the city's patrician elites whereas the majority of citizens were illiterate menial workers with little say in governance of their city. They lived in precarious circumstances and any awareness of the wider political context was limited to their own personal social and economic situation. At best, they would support popular leaders who's interests were perceived as aligned with theirs. While Jacob van Artevelde was seen as a popular hero, he very much belonged to a wealthy urban economic elite who had, equally, every interest to reinstate the English wool trade.
Finally, the Plague happened in the 1350's. Those same Flemish cities were already quite powerful in the late 13th century.
And all of that is just barely scratching the surface of the historical complexity which gets skimped in this article. It's never a good idea to single sidedly focus on the military aspect and try to explain history from that point of view.
This is reported by the Carolingians as brave but immoral, because Charlemagne had banned any such associations or militias, and military service was reserved for aristocrats only.
The response of the Frankish leadership was to come in and massacre the peasants who had defended their own land. Peasant autonomy and self-defense of any kind could not be tolerated.